The legal question raised recently in the Supreme Court by the lawyer for convicted murderer Clarence Hill is whether a 135-year-old civil rights law that was enacted to combat the Ku Klux Klan can be used to challenge lethal injections.

Lethal injection is the preferred method of carrying out death sentences in this country. Of the 1,019 people executed since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty 30 years ago, 851 have been killed by lethal injection, according to data compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center.

Hill, who is on death row for the 1982 killing of a Pensacola, Fla. cop, was nearly put to death in January. But the Supreme Court stopped his execution just moments before a lethal mix of drugs was to be pumped into his veins.

Hill’s attorney said his client isn’t trying to duck his court-ordered execution. He only wants to ensure that lethal injections are painless. In fact, his is one of several lawsuits challenging the use of lethal injections by states and the federal government for that reason.

I don’t like the death penalty. I think there’s an element of racism in how it’s applied. Data from the Death Penalty Information Center suggest it is more likely to be imposed when the defendant is black and the victim is white.

Despite my misgivings, I understand that capital punishment is used by the federal government and 38 states. What I don’t understand is why death penalty supporters care whether executions are seen as humane.

The Supreme Court long ago decided that capital punishment is constitutional. So why would the court or anyone who supports capital punishment quibble over the method of execution?

What does it matter if someone is put to death with a series of needles, an electric shock, a deadly gas, or at the end of a hangman’s noose? Why suggest that it matters that the condemned are executed painlessly? Dead is dead.

If capital punishment isn’t “cruel and unusual punishment” why should the federal government or any state have to submit their method of execution to a constitutional test? That’s essentially what Hill is asking in the case before the Supreme Court.

The question also exposes the flawed nature of this nation’s embrace of capital punishment.

Capital punishment supporters want the rest of us to think that an execution can be humane. There was a time when such “humanity” was measured by the efficiency of the hangman’s rope, the aim of a firing squad, or the ability of an electric chair to deliver a deadly jolt.

But in these days of kinder, gentler executions, death penalty proponents seem to believe that making capital punishment look like a deep sleep somehow renders this country more humane than others that spill blood when they execute the condemned.

So now the justices on the Supreme Court must decide what to do about Hill’s concerns that the method of lethal injection practiced in Florida carries an unconstitutional risk of great pain.

I can’t get past wondering why they would bother.